Monday, February 22, 2016

Announcing The Labyrinth of Flame's release in print!

Great news! The Labyrinth of Flame's beautiful illustrated physical edition is now available to buy at Seattle Book Company and on Amazon, courtesy of the same company that did the print run for my Kickstarter (Thomson-Shore). I'm really pleased about this, because I thought the quality of their print copies was excellent:

So if you're one of those readers who missed the Kickstarter and have been waiting patiently, go forth! Buy! (I get a slightly better deal from Seattle Book Company purchases, in case that matters to anyone. But honestly I don't care where you buy it as long as you enjoy it. :)

You'll note the book is being sold through Amazon by Thomson-Shore, not direct by Amazon. This is because I chose in the end not to go for wholesale trade distribution, where Thomson-Shore would have sold the book to the big distributors such as Baker & Taylor, Ingram, and Amazon, and then the distributors would fulfill orders from bookstores and vendors. To be honest, I don't expect to sell massive quantities of the print edition; so to cover the fees and costs of wholesale distribution, I would have had to make the book's list price so expensive I felt it wasn't reasonable. This way, the book is available at a decent price ($17.99) to those who wish to buy it, and I don't have to worry about ending up in the red.

Some folks have asked why I didn't go through CreateSpace or Ingram Spark as most self-publishers do, since both of those companies offer wholesale channels for very cheap cost. The biggest reason was quality: I've heard horror stories about CS's 10% defect rate. Ingram is said to be better, but apparently only if you already know what you're doing in terms of book production, as their interfaces are non-intuitive and their customer service apparently non-existent. One thing I've been very pleased with about Thomson-Shore is how responsive and helpful they are--I've had a great experience working with them. That said, if Labyrinth of Flame had not been illustrated, I might've risked CS or IS. But since the illustrations had to be printed on special insert paper for best quality, I wanted to go with a company I knew could offer that and do it well.

3 comments:

I´m very happy to hear that there´ll be a version for the "hand"! I very like your series. I´m curious, since the possibility to get a version in Germany is not so high, if it is somehow possible to get the paperback version in/to Germany? I had a look at the main amazon page, but they don´t deliver to Germany... Do you know some more?